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RE: Why whales are needed - and a proposal to insure the massive success of steemit, ie Subtractive Upvoting Gradient
Very insightful, the lottery aspect of posts payout may play an important role in Steemit's success. It's so much more motivating to know that a few hundred thousand bucks will be distributed today by chunks of 10k, 1k and 100 to the handful of most popular posts, and that everyone else will get smaller "consolation prize" payouts of a few cents to a few dozen bucks. This keeps the dream alive that someday one could be the one who wins the jackpot. And I think the relatively mundane content of top earning posts also helps sending the message that really anyone could strike gold.
Definitely the lotto behavior is very important, not only because it parallel's standard PoW mining, but as you say normal people see posts which anybody can make in 5 minutes make enough to pay rent (or living expenses for a year!) then they will at least try it.
THAT is the biggest hurdle, so if only we can retain the people that try it, then exponential subscriber growth is very likely.
My analysis is that the envy factor is the biggest obstacle, so anything that doesnt break the overall steemit but reduces the envy factor is helpful. And by making it clear the whale's are here to help the dolphins and the dolphins to help the minnows, it changes from an haves vs have-nots, to everybody is in the same boat and so highlighting success stories of minnow to dolphin to whale will be quite important.
And the best way to get the impression that steemit is about promoting minnows into dolphins into whales is to setup the math to be biased to do that.
So far, I have been quite impressed with the responsiveness of steemit to constructive criticisms. I have been harping on the unfairness and well, brokenness of the liquidity rewards. So of course as soon as I get a bot that is able to get 2% of the rewards, it is suspended :)
But it is all for the improving of steemit, and that is what we all need to work toward. Steemit will have to ignored the obvious things that need to be done to NOT become bigger than bitcoin. I view my job to identify and continue to highlight these obvious things that to an outsider coming into steemit like myself is easy to see, while people here since the beginning it is natural to get used to "the way things are" and not be so keen to change what made them lots of money.
Well, I made a similar proposal 2 months ago!
https://steemit.com/steem/@liondani/lottery-rewards-every-24-hours-for-10-lucky-curators